Michelle Obama and Big Bird

NPR & Public Television: Leftists Using Government to Take Your Money Without Asking

By John Kass

April 2, 2025

I’m not some big corporate business tycoon, with fat marketing budgets and lobbyists and servile corporate media to trumpet my wares across their platforms.

I’m a writer. Not exactly singing for my supper but scribbling for my supper, a one-man band, a scrivener.

Kind of like the old-time street peddlers selling vegetables, like my grandfather, Papou Yianni.

Why a peddler? Because IBM and Chase Bank weren’t hiring poor Greek villagers just then.

He started in business in Chicago around the turn of the century selling vegetables. He had only five bucks and with that huge sum on his first day, he bought a huge pallet of strawberries to sell. At that time, a fancy T-bone steak dinner cost around a dollar. A cigar cost a dime.

Papou carried half through the West Side with in a harness strapped to his back, and left the other half on the front porch of a nice American lady. Through smiles and gestures she said he could come and get them later.

“Stromberries!!!” he shouted, selling fruit. A future Rockefeller! “Strom–berries!!!”

Hours later, he sold out and went searching for the house of the nice lady where he left the other half of his goods.

But he couldn’t find the house with the stromberries. There were no boxes of stromberries on a porch. No nice lady, nothing.

So, on his first day in business, he’d lost half of his working capital.

He didn’t give up though. He took the money he had left and bought more stromberries, and other various fruit. Later a pushcart. And much later he got a horse to pull the cart. He sold fruit. And my grandmother learned valuable skills at Jane Adams Hull House. How to can and preserve vegetables. And midwifery. And other skills.

Thus they made their way, immigrants in the great and strange city, bustling with life and everyone working. Or fighting to work and keep what they had. In those days, if you didn’t work you didn’t eat in Chicago. There was no welfare. They didn’t come to Chicago for handouts. There were no goverenment “programs” for them. It’s not a boast. It was what it was. They were strangers in a strange land they called Tseecago, and they had to learn their way and survive or die.

They didn’t complain. They were free. At least there were no Turks to break down the door and kill them. Papou paid his bills. He fed his family. They saved.

So, what does all this have to do with Big Bird and Elmo and Oscar the Grouch and other such characters?

Like my grandfather, I’m selling my wares. I’m not driving a horse cart full of stromberries—though if I did, I’d get a stylish hat for my horse and cut holes in the brim for the horse’s ears.

But I am selling my wares. It’s what I do to make my living after I was publicly and wrongly defamed by the jacobins at “the paper” and I had to leave. But I still had stories in me. I wasn’t ready to quit and just curl up by the fire. Like old Laertes, I still had some spears left to throw.

And my loyal readers—and regular listeners to the Chicago Way podcast—know that I’ve begun advertising with several new radio commercials hoping to convince people to subscribe to johnkassnewss.com.

Recently, my friends at the Chicago Morning Answer radio program posted the offer with a discount coupon while I was sitting in, co-hosting with Dan Proft.

You can subscribe here.

I’m excited by it all. The media landscape is changing, what we once called newspapers are dead and dying, because they’ve lied and lost their credibility.

It’s an exciting, challenging time. I hope you join us.

But you know what I’m not doing?

I’m not using johnkassnews.com and the Chicago Way podcast to compel government officials to squeeze tax dollars out of all of you and give it to me.

I’m not using Big Bird and Elmo to front for the politicians taking your cash.

I hope you subscribe and join us, and allow me to charge a fair price for my labor. If you don’t like it, no one is compelling you to pay. As Don Barzini said, “after all we are not communists.”

But it’s your choice whether you’ll subscribe.

What I’m not doing is using the government to enrich me from your hard-earned pay. It’s yours.

Yet isn’t that what National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are doing: Using the hammer of government to take your cash without asking you.

And I don’t think that’s fair.

I like cooking shows on TV, and I’ve watched them including America’s Test Kitchen, on Chicago Public Television WTTW (Wilmette Talking to Winnetka).

But that’s not the only way to find them. You can find cooking shows on YouTube, too. “Sip and Feast” is one of my favorites, and #thatdudecancook, also “The Real Greek Chef”

The point is, there are choices. We’re free to choose.

But public television rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, and National Public Radio also takes in cash. In exchange, they provide news.

NPR’s Chicago Station does news. And so does Winnetka Talking to Wilmette.

Left wing news for people with pretensions. The public broadcasting news programs are a joke, Beltway pretentious featuring David Brooks as a New York Times writer who once visited the Billy Goat Tavern for a beer so he apparently knows all about Chicago politics. And NPR news is the same.

I call it Commie News, so do most common-sense Americans who don’t get a thrill by burning Teslas or considering MSNBC as the voice of their progressive gods.

A of couple years ago I wrote a column supporting Miranda Devine, the brave columnist of the New York Post. She wrote the blockbuster book about the Biden family corruption called “Laptop from Hell.”

It is the book that illustrates the corruption of Big Tech and corruption of Big Media–corporate legacy media–that suppressed the New York Post’s stunning expose in October 2020 of that Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell.”

Most Americans had found it difficult to understand all the ways they’ve been lied to by what we call corporate media.

But they woke up.

The column focused on the lies told by National Public Radio and public television news—all of it left wing with their newsrooms full (90 percent) of left-wing reporters.

Remember that when Miranda Devine and the New York Post broke the story about the Biden laptop before the 2020 presidential election, Biden’s political lickspittle including soon-to-be Secretary of State Anthony Blinken were running a disinformation political op falsely claiming the laptop was the work of the Russians. It was not. It belonged to Hunter Biden and the FBI and the rest of the Deep State knew it.

But National Public Radio’s managing editor Terrence Samuel guaranteed he’ll leave an immortal legacy of NPR as National Jester Radio, the national broadcast clown car with this quote about why leftist NPR ignored the most important story in decades.

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” Samuel said.

Not really stories?

“And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was . . . a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way,” Samuel said.

So, NPR has formally become National Deep State Radio. And the news division of public television not merely “leans left.” It is deeply hard left. There is no lean.

Both NPR and Public Television have pushed left-wing propaganda—papered with woke children’s shows and cooking and upper Middle-Class programming like Downton Abbey.

Both public radio and public television trotted happily along, pulling in the cash and shaping voters for the Democrat Party.

But then Republicans won both houses of Congress and the White House. The bill came due a few days ago, as Katherine Maher, NPR’s chief executive, testified before congress humiliating not only herself, but all her Marxist minions.

They’re going to lose public funding for their propaganda machines. No wonder they’re burning Teslas in rage.

Law professor Jonathan Turley wrote an excellent piece about it all in The Hill:

NPR’s CEO just made the best case yet for defunding NPR.

Maher was confronted with her own reality and she lost.

When asked about her past public statements that President Donald Trump is a “deranged, racist sociopath,” she said that she would not post such views today.

She also brushed off her statements that America is “addicted to White supremacy” and denounced the use of the words “boy and girl” as “erasing language” for non-binary people.

“When asked about her past assertion that the U.S. was founded on ‘black plunder and white democracy,’”  Turley wrote. “Maher said she no longer believed what she had said. She also wrote that “America is addicted to white supremacy. When asked about her support for the book “The Case for Reparations,” Maher denied any memory of ever having read the book. She was then read back her own public statements about how she took a day to read the book in a virtue-signaling post.”

Uh oh Katherine.

Maher denied calling for reparations, but was read back her own declaration: “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.”

Turley said the CEO then bizarrely claimed she had not meant giving Black people actual money, or “fiscal reparations.”

What would they get? Left wing feelings?

Even the New York Times gives readers a choice.

And I don’t compare my work to the great gray lady. But from my peddler’s wagon, I give people a choice.

If they don’t like the banana, then don’t buy it. But don’t bruise it.

Yet NPR and Public Broadcasting don’t give listeners and viewers that choice. They have leverage and they want it so they take it. They simply rely on Democrat politicians to take money from the public.

That’s not the American Way.

That’s the jacobin way, or the neo-Marxist Way.

You might even call it The Chicago Way ™

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

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